I disagree on "avoiding the gold rush mentality". Without that you don't sell jeans to the 49ers either. :)

But irrespective of jeans, this is a Darwinian world. Out of the many many ideas. some may initially even seem stupid, you have no idea where the next $150bMarket cap compnay will come from.

I remember seeing Facebook when it was at the dorm stage, courtesy my niece. And saw subsequent valuations for what I thought was a stupid $4b valuation by a Russian company. Oh how hind-sight is 20/20.

So bring on the Internet powere tennis rackets, forks, and shoe-laces. All I know is it will be an exciting future.

I'll be speaking Friday at EDPS in Monterey about this. http://www.eda.org/edps/edps_program.php

My hypothesis is that the "killer app" for IoT and wearables is a thing that actually stops you from being killed, either by acute or chronics dangers. So the real innovation will probably be in sensor for devices focused on medical, military and industrial safety.

But still there seem to be plenty of reasonable use cases for connected things. For example , assuming feedback greatly accelerates training(i believe it does) , better feedback is worth quite a lot for someone who plays a sport and wants to improve. And since a decent standard tennis racket costs $100 , a connected tennis racket at $150-$200 seems a reasonable offer.

But since we're talking about commodity chips there's a large uncertainty about how much growth this means to chip companies.

And that includes this so called SOC the author talks about.I'm trying to picture such a system sold to consumers and it's hard to see the benefits(for the end user) , over wifi plus a $5 BOM zigbee/bluetooth-mesh/LORA-wireless stick that connects to your router and connects your products to the IOT and lets the cloud do the compute , maybe with extra coverage where needed done by something like LORA basestations ?

These devices are the outer "tentacles" of a much larger system. The security and safety of that system are determined by the security and safety of the weakest link in that system. I'll bet the IoT devices will be that weakest link.

Do we really trust IoT device vendors, especially those new innovative startups who are hungry for growth at any cost, to increase their costs to protect our data or our lives?

Heck, we couldn't even trust FitBit to properly test the wrist bands on their FitBit Force products, resulting in at least hundreds of cases of FitBit rash and perhaps killing the FitBit brand in the long term.

With so many fraudsters having a joyride with the people's finances using the netwbanking, on line shopping , credit card cloning and all kind of tricks through the internet, we are really scared what Pandora's Box this internet of things will open up for the on line goons.

If somebody's health is at stake then we have to ask some serious questions about how useful the proliferation of IOT could be as a whole to the society and is it not the right time to take a stock of the security situation on the internet and tighten all the loose screws and close all the security loop holes before we allow the IOT tsunami to attack us?